In 1971, St Christopher Episcopal Church in League City, Texas, gave a Bible to a parishioner, David Scott.

That August, Colonel David R. Scott took the Bible with him to the Moon and left it there.

Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing in 1969, the church remembered its gift to Scott by posting pictures on Facebook of a lunar rover on the Moon’s Hadley Plains area. Scott’s Bible was left behind on that vehicle, meaning it is perhaps the only Bible outside Earth today.

As reported in the Episcopal News Service by Egan Millard, Scott commanded the Apollo 15 mission and was the seventh person to walk on the moon.

“On August 2, 1971, just before returning to Earth, Scott placed the St Christopher Bible on the lunar rover’s control panel,” writes Millard. “He walked to a nearby hollow, where he placed a memorial plaque and statuette honouring the astronauts who had died during their missions, and then he returned to the lunar module.

Scott later presented to his church a signed copy of a photo showing the Bible sitting where he left it on the lunar rover.